How to Use the Line Item Database Backup and Restore - (2024)

See more videos and subscribe to the Proposal Kit YouTube channel

In this video we're going to describe how the line item database backup and recovery system works. There's a couple places where the Wizard will automatically make a backup copy of your entire line item database definition file to ensure that if anything goes wrong or unexpected you can just go and easily refer back to your previous version. So one of those is when you are in your project screen and you're picking templates.

If you already have a database set up for your project and then you go and add a template that's database enabled that you don't have the categories for in your current database definition the Wizard is going to give you the option to have it add all of the line item database information for the new template you're adding. It will back up your database at this point. Say we had a cost summary and invoice selected with a database and then we added a budget.

The Wizard is going to ask you if you want to add all the budget line item categories to your current database. If you say yes it will first back up your database. Now the second way that the Wizard will automatically back up your database definition is when you are in the line item quote database screens whenever you click the Edit Definition button.

Because this this is the place where all the database changes get made it will back it up for you every time you click this button. So if you went into your Edit Definition, you made some changes and for some reason you decided you wanted to instead of undoing them just revert back to the previous version you can just go into the Backup and Restore. We've already made a few backups for this database definition.

You can see where they're differentiated between auto and manual. The auto ones are created using those two scenarios that I already showed you and the manual ones are made when you just click this Create New Backup. So I can just click Create New Backup and it just backed it up to new file and marked it manually.

It has the date and time that each one is made so in this scenario you know we've started with a just a basic product database then we went and added a budget which auto added a bunch of categories and then we went into the Edit Definition and we actually intentionally made a a mistake in a calculation. So now you kind of have to decide which backup do I want to revert to. There's a couple little tools in here that might help.

So if you click this Test all Backups and Show Error Counts this will actually loop through all the backup databases and run the full tests on them. You can go and see, oh what was the last backup that didn't have any errors. Maybe we just want to revert back to this one here or you know what if we want to revert back to the database before say that budget had been added.

Which one is that? So we can just start View Backup Info for each one and we see this one has the products category and that's it. This next one here has the products category as well. This third one that's just the products category and here we see we have a manual backup.

Okay, so this one has the product category, the income sources, the assets, budget. This has all the categories for the budget. If I wanted to go and revert back to my database before that was auto added we just click this one right here.

Restore from Backup and we will have our original database set up. Now what if we were just wanted to go back to the last backup before any errors occurred? Well we could just click that one right there, Restore from Backup and that gets us back to the last database definition that didn't have any errors. You can clean things up, you can remove backups if too many get in here.

That you probably don't really need to do that. This is where you can come in and create a new backup anytime you want. Now for auto backup so this doesn't fill up with too many backups it's going to default to 30 auto backups.

Once you hit 30 auto backups every time it creates a new auto backup it'll just delete the oldest of the 30 auto backups. It'll never delete the manual backups. You can adjust that over in your System Settings.

We actually have it set down to 10 here just for demo purposes but by default it's going to be 30. So that is really all there is to the backup and restore system. How backups get created and how you can restore them and a couple tools to help you figure out which backup you might want to revert back to.